A family firm that hangs bells rather than casting them.

Whites of Appleton is not a foundry, and never has been. It is a firm of church bellhangers — the people who build the frames, fittings and wheels that let bells swing and ring — and it says it was “founded in 1824 by Alfred White,” who had learned bell-ringing in 1818. It describes itself, on its own website, as “the oldest continuously trading Bellhanging Company in the United Kingdom,” which we report as its own claim.

Its working workshop, where frames are built, is in Appleton, a village near Abingdon in Oxfordshire, not far from Oxford, where the company’s registered office now sits. It says it makes “bell frames and fittings… in our workshops at Appleton,” and its tagline is “Combining traditional craftmanship with modern technology,” with the site’s own spelling.

England’s tradition of hanging bells to swing full circle for change-ringing gives bellhangers a particular importance there; a bell is only as good as the frame and fittings that let it ring. Whites’ business, for two centuries, has been that frame and everything attached to it.

A change of hands in 2025.

The company today is Whites of Appleton Ltd, incorporated in 2003 and active, according to Companies House. The register shows a recent change: Brian Ralph White resigned as a director on 31 March 2025, and his entry as a person with significant control ended the same day; James Andrew Haseldine, a director since 2011, became a person with significant control on that date. Other directors include Andrew Haseldine and Graham John Clifton, a director since the company’s incorporation in 2003. Since March 2025, Companies House no longer lists a White as director or person with significant control, so we do not describe it as White-family-run today.

Its most notable recent acquisition came from London. When the Whitechapel Bell Foundry closed its Whitechapel Road site in 2017, it said that Whites of Appleton, “a company with whom the Whitechapel Bell Foundry has worked closely for 197 years, has purchased the pattern equipment.” Whites also took a bell-tuning machine from the closing foundry, so it can continue to make Whitechapel components and tune bells.

Whites does not cast Whitechapel’s bells, and it does not claim to. The foundry’s 2017 statement said its tower bells would be cast by Westley Group Ltd, which is based in Newcastle-under-Lyme, and its handbells by a new London company, Bells of Whitechapel Ltd. Whites holds the patterns and hangs the bells. The London foundry itself cast its last tower bells on 22 March 2017, and its Grade II*-listed site was given planning permission in 2021 for a hotel. In Britain, Heritage Crafts now lists bell founding as “critically endangered,” saying it takes place “almost solely in Loughborough.” Bellhanging, the trade Whites practises, is its close companion.

A cathedral’s bells and a wartime loss.

Notre-Dame de Paris shows what a bell’s life can involve. Eight new bells were installed in its north belfry in 2013, beside the great bourdon Emmanuel, dated 1686, and a new bourdon, Marie. After the fire of April 2019, the public body rebuilding the cathedral says, the bells “ont subi la chaleur de l’incendie” — were exposed to its heat — and had to be checked; they were taken down in July 2023, cleaned and, in two cases, restored by heat treatment in Austria, and on 12 September 2024 “les huit cloches ont fait leur retour dans la cathédrale.” The cathedral also gained new bells for its reopening: the Paris diocese says that in October 2024 two new bells, Chiara and Carlo, were cast at the Cornille-Havard foundry, joining a bell given by the Paris 2024 organisers; they first rang at Mass on 8 December 2024. Its great bourdons returned to full swinging peal only from 17 July 2025.

Bells have also been treated as raw metal in wartime. A 1947 photograph in Germany’s federal archives shows the “Glockenfriedhof” — bell cemetery — in Hamburg’s free port, captioned: “Diese Glocken wurden von den Nazis während des II. Weltkrieges beschlagnahmt um sie einzuschmelzen” — these bells were confiscated by the Nazis during the Second World War to be melted down. German sources estimate that about 45,000 bells were destroyed in Germany and some 35,000 more from occupied territories; the figures vary, so we attribute them. The same German sources say some 65,000 bells were melted down in the First World War, and that after 1945 more than 13,000 surviving bells were identified and returned from Hamburg.

Bells are recognised as culture too. In 2014 UNESCO selected Belgium’s programme for “Safeguarding the carillon culture” for its Register of Good Safeguarding Practices, and in 2022 it inscribed manual bell ringing in Spain — extended to Italy in 2024 — on its Representative List, calling it “a form of communication that is tied to the classification, acoustics and shapes of bells, bell towers and belfries.”

Bell metal is a bronze of roughly four parts copper to one of tin — “approximately 78% copper and 22% tin,” according to the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America. Tin is the costly part: the US Geological Survey says the average New York price of refined tin rose 13 per cent in 2025, to 1,600 cents a pound.

A family name over a bell frame.

Whites’ brand is a surname and a village — Whites of Appleton — in the old English pattern of naming a trade after the family and the place. Its tagline pairs “traditional” with “modern technology,” the balance every heritage craft firm tries to strike. Its product is mostly invisible to the public — frames, bearings and wheels hidden in a tower — so its brand depends on reputation among ringers and churches rather than on display.

For a design guide, Whites shows a supporting trade becoming a guardian of another firm’s legacy. The bellhanger that worked with Whitechapel for nearly two centuries now holds its pattern equipment. Compare Taylor’s, the Loughborough foundry that both casts and hangs bells.

For this guide we use an oak green and a sage with a serif, an unofficial interpretation. No bell, frame or mark is reproduced.

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